Safe deposit box nests typically are available in various compartment sizes to accommodate safe deposit boxes of different dimensions insofar as their height and width are concerned. But basically each nest is usually formed within a standard sized outer housing, a number of which are stacked together to form overall banks of boxes of varying sizes. For instance, some housings might each contain 30 compartments 2 inches high and 10 inches wide, some 24 compartments 5 inches high and five inches wide, others 21 compartments 3 inches high and 10 inches wide, still others 60 compartments 2 inches high and 5 inches wide, and so on. In order to keep manufacturing costs within reason, obviously it is necessary that the compartment construction and arrangement within each housing be as modular as possible. This in turn requires designs that allow the interior of each housing to be assembled from parts which differ from each other as little as possible and which are also as rudimentary as possible. At the same time, the need to work or rework parts individually by hand in order that they fit properly within allowed tolerances must be kept to a minimum. The goal, therefore, is a design which allows the compartments to be built up from a stock of standard, readily fabricated parts that require the least possible amount of labor to assemble in finished form.
The chief obstacle to the foregoing centers about the compartment doors themselves which must fit the fronts of the individual compartments to fairly close tolerances. While the doors alone can readily be fabricated uniformly, yet it has proven difficult to provide sufficiently uniform openings at the fronts of the compartments with the consequence that the doors must be individually fitted by hand, not just once but often several times. There are several reasons for this. In the first place, the compartments are typically formed by a number of horizontal shelves between which are vertical partitions. The shelves are usually plate or sheet material so that their spacing and thickness determine the height of the doors. But the thickness of such material varies enough so that the height of the front openings of the compartments is not sufficiently uniform. Hence, each door must be fitted for height to its individual compartment.
In the second place, the doors are typically hinged to and strike against upright members which form front side edges of the compartments, the partitions which are normally sheet material extending rearwardly from the upright members. In order for the width of the compartments to be uniform, therefore, cross-sectional variations in the upright members must be minimal and their lateral spacing must be accurate. Then, usually, the hinge knuckles are separately applied to the doors and to the upright members requiring still more individual fitting. Complicating things further is the fact that after assembly of the shelves and partitions and the fitting of the doors, every thing is normally fastened together and to the outer housing by welds. The latter produce various distortions among the parts which in turn often affects the front openings of some of the compartments and thus their doors. Hence the latter doors again must be individually refitted. In short, a great deal of painstaking hand labor is typically required to achieve a satisfactory final fit of the doors, and since each door is individually fitted, interchangeability of doors is impossible.
The primary objects of the present invention are therefore to provide a safe deposit box nest construction and a method of accomplishing same in which the need for individual hand-fitting of the doors is eliminated and in which the number of parts necessary to construct nests of differing compartment size is reduced.